MPAA Whacs A Few More Moles, Declares Premature Victory While Making Movie Fans Worse Off

from the good-luck-with-that-strategy dept

The MPAA gleefully announced on Tuesday that it had shut down the main fork of Popcorn Time along with torrent site YTS (and its associated release group YIFY). Of course, if we go back through the history of file sharing, we can find plenty of times when the MPAA similarly declared victory over the shutdown of other file sharing sites -- and not a single one did a damn thing to slow down piracy rates. People just move on to something else. And yet, the MPAA thinks that it did something important here:

“This coordinated legal action is part of a larger comprehensive approach being taken by the MPAA and its international affiliates to combat content theft,” said Chris Dodd, chairman and chief executive of the MPAA, in a statement.

Dodd also says, "By shutting down these illegal commercial enterprises, which operate on a massive global scale, we are protecting not only our members’ creative work and the hundreds of innovative, legal digital distribution platforms, but also the millions of people whose jobs depend on a vibrant motion picture and television industry.”

Dodd is wrong. He's not protecting anything, other than perhaps his own job. Shutting down these sites doesn't decrease infringement -- the infringement just moves elsewhere. It's a giant game of whac-a-mole that the MPAA (and RIAA) have been playing for over a decade, and never seeing any kind of different result.

We highlighted this just last month with our Carrot or Stick research report, which made it clear that these enforcement efforts don't do a damn thing to slow down piracy, and don't do anything to help content creators or the wider creative ecosystem to get paid. You know what does do that? Allowing more innovation to flow. Popcorn Time was popular not just because it was "free" but because the interface and usability were incredible. The MPAA should be learning from that, in understanding how to help offer better products rather than celebrating shutting it down.

Again and again we've seen that when people are presented with good, convenient and reasonably priced options, they massively decrease their infringing activities. But the MPAA has actually made that difficult by burdening most services with ridiculous requirements (like forcing people to watch a movie within 24 hours, or limiting things so that the market becomes fragmented and people can't find the content they actually want to see). If the MPAA were truly concerned with making sure that revenue was supporting the creative ecosystem it would be looking at what Popcorn Time did right, and creating a legal service based on it. Cheering on the fact that you whac'd another mole, while everyone's already moved on to something else is hardly something worth celebrating.

The hydra has already awakened

I've seen four announcements of similar (new) services in the past 24 hours. There will be more. Some will succeed, some won't. But the end result of this is that the number of sharing sites will increase, not decrease...and all of the new ones will learn from their predecessors' mistakes.

The MPAA cannot win. The MPAA cannot be allowed to win. The MPAA must be destroyed by any means necessary.